‘Execution’ — Report details video evidence and new witness claims about unsolved killing of teen at CHOP

An image from the livestream video that captured the aftermath of the shooting

A joint investigative journalism project from the Seattle Times and KUOW has made new revelations about the CHOP killing of teen Antonio Mays Jr. including an account from a previously unknown witness and video evidence the reporters say mark the killing as an execution-style shooting after a night of drive-by panic around the protest zone.

According to the new details revealed as part of a NPR-backed podcast series about the deadly shooting, the reporting team discovered a third, previously unknown teenager was inside the stolen Jeep Cherokee alongside Mays Jr. and 14-year-old Robert West when the shooting occurred.

The Times and KUOW claim the Seattle Police Department never identified or interviewed this third passenger during its official investigation.

In the report, the third teenager described the night’s killing as an “execution” and said that an armed individual approached the Jeep after it had already crashed and come to a complete stop, firing directly into the vehicle at close range, killing Mays Jr. and seriously wounding West.

The investigative team interviewed another witness that corroborated details of the account, describing the gunman as “someone who was built like ‘a middle linebacker’” with a handgun.

The reporters also analyzed more than a dozen videos recorded during the event to reconstruct a timeline of the shooting and say some video evidence appears to show the figure approach the vehicle but said that the Seattle Police Department has not publicly released its security video recorded of the area around the East Precinct that might have more clearly captured the shooting.

The deadly shooting — one of two killings of Black teens in the 2020 protest camp on the streets of Capitol Hill — came early on a Monday morning amid a night of drive-by shooting fears around the protest zone. Mays was shot inside a stolen Jeep Cherokee that had been reported driving at high speeds through the streets around the CHOP camp. The teen died as camp security and medic volunteers scrambled to save him while Seattle Police and Seattle Fire refused to enter the protest area.

Armed security at the camp has been blamed for the shooting but no suspects in the June 29th, 2020 killing have been publicly identified. SPD says the investigation of the Mays Jr. slaying remains an open case.

West, Mays’s 14-year-old companion in the vehicle, survived but suffered a brain injury.

The shooting was a final straw as Seattle Police were ordered to storm the protest encampments and clear the area two days later.

The new evidence from the Times and KUOW project would upend previous self-defense narrative, establishing that the fatal shots were fired at close range after the vehicle was disabled.

There are also new details gathered from the interviews and video evidence that provide the clearest picture yet of the camp’s panic that night and the twists and turns with life and death that followed including the descriptions of one scene as Mays, bleeding to death, was loaded by the camp’s volunteer medics into a silver Pathfinder in an attempt to rush the teen to a waiting ambulance. That same Pathfinder, the investigation’s review of video and interviews revealed, had been pursuing the teens and the stolen Jeep only minutes earlier, shots blazing.

A forensic analyst later hired by the City of Seattle to examine the videos as part of its investigation and legal defense, determined the only gunshots documented by video evidence from the night were fired at — not from — the Jeep.

In the report, the investigative team also talked with the livestreamer who recorded the video showing people from the protest camp around the bullet-riddled Jeep. She can be heard yelling, “Don’t touch it!” as another person, unseen in the video speaks up. “Unless you see any shells on the ground, pick those up and pocket them, take them home,” he says.

The investigative team was able to interview the livestreamer but encountered a familiar wall.

“There’s stuff that’s happening, that happened there that I’m not going to divulge,” she says in the report. “But it’s like, what’s the No. 1 rule of Fight Club?”

“In dozens of interviews over the journalists’ 18-month investigation, people who were at or near the scene of the shooting have either said they know nothing about it or refused to say what they know,” the team concludes.

The “We Keep Us Safe” podcast episodes including the new details aired in July. The series concluded with a report published this weekend in the Seattle Times.

In a case that centered on the Seattle Police Department’s abandonment of the East Precinct and the failures in the emergency response to the 12th Ave shooting scene, a King County jury in January arrived at compensatory damages totaling more than $30 million for Mays’s father and family in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city.

The city is appealing the verdict and the case remains pending before the state court.

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